As our days become decidedly more messy we are pushed to try out more slow cooker meals. This one comes courtesy of Emily Green and her fun blog Emily Bites. Though it requires cooking a fresh pot of pasta as you come home it still made life easier. She also suggests serving the meatballs and marinara sauce on buns.
We couldn't get around tweaking this a little to fit our pantry. First we shredded dried bread into 2 handfuls of bread crumbs. We added it into a bowl with 1 lb of ground beef, 2 eggs, a handful of freshly shredded Parmesan, a quarter cup of milk, a bit of garlic powder, dried oregano, dried basil, salt, and pepper. We mixed it all up with our hands, adding a few breadcrumbs when it felt too mushy, and formed about 16 meatballs.
We fried them up on the outside only and tossed them into the slow cooker.
For the sauce we diced up half a big onion, 2 cloves of garlic, and a handful of fresh leaves of basil.
Check out the basil plant by-the-by. It has grown like crazy within 6 weeks or so.
In the same pan loosening the fried beef bits we melted the onions for a few minutes in olive oil, added the garlic for another, and then 1 big can of crushed tomatoes, 1 small can of tomato sauce, a little tomato paste, the basil, salt, and 1 bay leaf. All that got transferred right away into the slow cooker.
We let it simmer on low for 8 hours.
It was so scrumptious that we forgot to take a picture of the final result. It was an excellent end-of-the-week-just-feed-me dish. Thank you Emily!
